What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like

Thanks for the links. Your comments about the "OLDEST HUMAN VOICE RECORDING OF ALL TIME" reminded me about a thought experiment I once heard.

Imagine a pottery wheel spinning thousands of years ago, and people talking as it spun. Then imagine that for some reason, a stick or other object was leaning against the wheel, and engraving a pattern. Theoretically, the vibrations of the people speaking would be picked up (at some level) by this engraving.

The end result is that if you had a device that was sufficiently sensitive, and you could remove a sufficiently large amount of noise (caused by other sources of vibration), then you could reconstruct an actual recording of people speaking thousands of years ago.

Of course, it is not likely that this will happen in the near future, or even at all. In fact, a quick search will show that it has already been used as an April Fools joke by some scientists [0].

However, that is not to say that it is impossible.

The reason I love this thought experiment is because it goes to show that if you start with the presumption that at some point, our tools become better, then there are very few limits to what can be found out. What would happen if you went back 150 years and told everybody that in 150 years, we would have tools that can track the trajectories of sub-atomic particles as they travel at speeds horrendously close to the speed of light?

[0] - http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/02/20/5000-year-old-recordings-c...

The fact that when the earliest recordings were made they had no intention or technology to play them back but now we can (at least to get a rough idea) leads to a fascinating idea: capture of a signal may be decoupled from its playback, which may be impossible with current technology. This, of course, brings to mind the 2011 experiment from UC Berkeley (http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clip...). We shouldn't worry about the horrible quality of the playback for these but focus on recording and preserving the brain activity.

I love this Éduouard recording of 'Gamme de la Voix'. You can really hear the singer go out of key on the 'mi' and 'sol', it's that precise. Seeing music visualized for the first time must have been as wondrous as seeing a Michelin map.

How do you pronounce it? I'm from New Zealand, and "gray-am" seems to be the common pronunciation here.

That is the way it is pronounced in the uk.

Gee, that's funny -- I'm pretty sure that is how it's pronounced.

Well, the photophone was actually a much cooler device anyway. Experimental wireless transfer of human speech over 200 meters from a completely passive device using optical scattering? In 1880? Sweet! The receiver was active, but transmitter was not at all. Somewhat similar to modern UHF RFID technology.

Bell was actually a pretty awesome engineer largely motivated by wanting to help the impaired.

Well, at least Antonio Meucci's Globe Telephone Company was sued by the Bell Telephone Company for patent infringement. It was really a messy law suit where one question was whether Meucci had invented the electromagnetic telephone or "just" an acoustic one.

Can you explain what you mean? I don't understand.

The center hole is too small or at least its proportions don't match up with a CD.

But in any case, how would you design a recording device? The text says there were mostly cylinders and discs, which makes sense because you can put a spiral track on those. In the disc case you would have to rotate them around their Z axis which pretty much requires a hole in the center. So I guess it's not that surprising that Bell's cardboard-and-wax disc, vinyl records, laserdiscs and CDs all look pretty similar.